It’s great to be the smartest guy in the room if you’re a president, economist, or engineer. It’s less than great if you’re Baruch Spinoza — the pioneering 17th-century Dutch philosopher, Enlightenment thinker, and pantheistic provocateur behind the seminal tome Ethics.

The first date in Actors’ Playhouse’s First Date is neither a hellish mismatch nor a heavenly connection. It’s rather like most of them—generic questions, nervous laughter, the occasional foot-in-mouth blunder—except for the irrepressible song and dance that erupt from the voices in the characters’ heads. In this musical comedy, which…

Irony, along with brevity, can be the soul of wit. But if it’s done poorly, irony is the bailiwick of unimaginative writers who can’t see past the most obvious cognitive dissonance. The psychiatrist who needs a psychiatrist, the professional matchmaker whose love life is a shambles, and the self-help guru…

Named after the group of laborers that mounts plays in the woods in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this Austin-based collective launched in 1995 after its members, then undergrads at the University of Texas, studied the Bard in barns. It was all part of a summer retreat called Shakespeare at…

We’re a country of snap judgments. In the court of public opinion, we render verdicts with the same knee-jerk immediacy that we employ to consume news. It’s all headlines and tweets. We lack the time, inclination, and attention span to go beneath the surface. Twelve Angry Men delves deeper. Reginald…

As GableStage prepares for the opening of Choir Boy, its fourth Tarell Alvin McCraney production in as many seasons, artistic director Joseph Adler can’t stop himself from talking about the playwright and Miami native. “I’ve known him since he was in high school at New World, and I’ve watched his…

Did Mad Cat’s Paul Tei select Neil Simon’s The Star-Spangled Girl despite the fact that it’s a bad play or because of it? This is an unusual question to ponder when attending a play, but Mad Cat operates on a different plane of reality from most companies, a headspace so…

It says a lot that Tarell Alvin McCraney’s radical reinterpretation of Antony and Cleopatra — a GableStage coproduction with New York’s Public Theater and the UK’s Royal Shakespeare Company, and a play anticipated for more than a year — wasn’t the best or second-best or even third-best work GableStage produced…

Actors’ Playhouse has an identity crisis. How else do you explain the emotional whiplash induced by its programming every year? This is a theater torn between cutting-edge drama and milquetoast comedy, between shows that push its audience in new directions and ones that reward passive complacency. Two seasons ago, it…

Playwright Joshua Harmon may or may not have been thinking of No Exit when he wrote his acrid dramedy Bad Jews. But after seeing the riveting new production of Harmon’s play at GableStage, Sartre’s metaphysical masterpiece seems like a touchstone in at least one sense: It depicts a handful of…

Americans are right that the bonds of our communities have withered, and we are right to fear that this transformation has very real costs.” — Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone In 21st-century America, we don’t know who our neighbors are. Property lines loom large, tenants and homeowners are more reclusive than…

Miami Theater Center’s Hedda Gabler opens in a way no other versions of Henrik Ibsen’s 19th-century classic ever have. In a wordless prologue, with semitranslucent curtains shrouding the audience’s view, the title character (Jessica Farr) slinks down the elegant staircase of her new home, a strikingly modern, antiseptically white villa…

In the Arsht Center’s production of Peter and the Starcatcher, University of Miami senior Joshua Jacobson doesn’t just fill the title role, an orphaned boy who becomes Peter Pan. He also plays a pirate, a sailor, a British seaman, and a door — yes, the kind that other characters open…

Terrence McNally’s Mothers and Sons, which opened last weekend at GableStage, is a profound inquiry into the human condition, delivered in a sweepingly emotional experience that fully justifies the art form. It’s been far too long since I left an auditorium as teary, speechless, and physically affected. This production is…

Terrence McNally’s Mothers and Sons, which opened last weekend at GableStage, is a profound inquiry into the human condition, delivered in a sweepingly emotional experience that fully justifies the art form. It’s been far too long since I left an auditorium as teary, speechless, and physically affected. This production is…

Ground Up and Rising, the minimalist Miami theater company, is still at war. Two months after its production of Bill Cain’s 9 Circles dramatized the hellish fallout of an American soldier’s unspeakable war crimes in Iraq, the company remains ensconced in the psychological shrapnel of combat. This weekend, Ground Up…

Ground Up and Rising, the minimalist Miami theater company, is still at war. Two months after its production of Bill Cain’s 9 Circles dramatized the hellish fallout of an American soldier’s unspeakable war crimes in Iraq, the company remains ensconced in the psychological shrapnel of combat. This weekend, Ground Up…

The real-life mining community of Centralia, Pennsylvania, has been devastated by an underground coal fire since the early ’60s. The monoxide-laden disaster has polluted the town’s air and prompted a massive government-funded relocation of its citizenry. But a few defiant souls remain living in their hometown–fewer than 10, currently–and their…

There is a place called Centralia, whose citizens are called Centralians. It is not the product of a science-fiction writer’s imagination. It is an actual American town, but in 2002 this borough in Columbia County, Pennsylvania, had lost so many residents that the U.S. Postal Service revoked its zip code…

There is a place called Centralia, whose citizens are called Centralians. It is not the product of a science-fiction writer’s imagination. It is an actual American town, but in 2002 this borough in Columbia County, Pennsylvania, had lost so many residents that the U.S. Postal Service revoked its zip code…